Grant: “What do you think is so bad about ‘girl’? I’m a girl. And your boss, and powerful, and rich, and hot, and smart. So if you perceive ‘Supergirl’ as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?”

Calista Flockhart plays an authoritative Cat Grant, a casting choice which itself implies (to me) a defense of the type of femininity Flockhart performed as Ally McBeal in her best-known role to date.

I don’t find Grant’s argument convincing, since my particular beef with the “girl” suffix is around connotations of immaturity, and particularly because we do not tend to call men of similar ages “boys”. That’s unequal. But I appreciate that at least this teaser attempts a defense. And overall I loved the teaser, and it made me cry. Stories of women discovering and claiming our power, in ourselves and to help others, will always get me.

Model View Culture’s Queer issue is out! Individual articles will be scattered over the spam over the next week, but check out the whole thing.

FOSS4G — a conference for open source geospatial software, to be held in Portland Oregon in September — is dedicating 50% of their travel grants funding for women and minority attendees. Applications close May 30. They’re also looking for donations to the travel fund; you can donate when you register for the event.

Nerf Rebelle does damage – and not the good kind | Geek In Sydney (May 16): “There’s nothing intrinsic that requires girls to have pink Nerf guns. It’s purely a marketing decision and in my view it’s sad that it works. More importantly, though, every single time we go down this road it’s another brick in the wall that artificially separates girls and boys expectations.”

Ignore data, focus on power | Cathy O’Neil at mathbabe (May 20): “I like data that shines light on powerful people. Like the Sunlight Foundation tracks money and politicians, and that’s good. But I tend to want to protect powerless people, like people who are being surveilled with sensors and their phones. And the thing is, most of the open data focuses on the latter… The power is where the data isn’t.”

Uses and Abuses of Girls | Janet at Dear Author (May 20): “However, the emphasis here is not on content, but on the production of celebrity as a function of teen girl fan loyalty, a commodity generated by these young girls, and then commodified by men and sold back to them in the form of celebrity stand-ins.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”

Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

During December and January, Geek Feminism is republishing some of our 2012 posts for the benefit of new and existing readers. This post originally appeared on August 17, 2012.

A few times within the lifetime of this blog, there’s been a major emergency in geekdom: a geek girl has needed a confidence boost.

I hear you cough. Someone just said “geek girl” on Geek Feminism, the home of “ahem, geek women, THANK YOU”?

No really, I mean it, a geek girl. A prepubescent girl has been bullied or heard some gender essentialist crap, and a call to arms goes out. The best known is probably Katie Goldman, the then seven year old whose mother wrote in November 2010 that Katie was being bullied for liking Star Wars, a boy thing:

But a week ago, as we were packing her lunch, Katie said, “My Star Wars water bottle is too small. It doesn’t hold enough water. Can I take a different one?” She searched through the cupboard until she found a pink water bottle and said, “I’ll bring this.”

I was perplexed. “Katie, that water bottle is no bigger than your Star Wars one. I think it is actually smaller.”

“It’s fine, I’ll just take it,” she insisted.

I kept pushing the issue, because it didn’t make sense to me. Suddenly, Katie burst into tears.

She wailed, “The first grade boys are teasing me at lunch because I have a Star Wars water bottle. They say it’s only for boys. Every day they make fun of me for drinking out of it. I want them to stop, so I’ll just bring a pink water bottle.”

Katie’s story went viral including at the official Star Wars blog and a year later CNN reported that at GeekGirlCon when a brigade of Storm Troopers formed an honor guard for Katie, and that there’s an annual Wear Star Wars day as a result.

Here’s something I was struck by: when I tweeted about Maya’s post, back in May, I saw replies from men saying that they were crying (with joy, I assume!) about the response to Maya. I have to say I do NOT see a lot of admitted crying about other posts on our blog, no matter how positive or inspirational. (People love the existence of the Wednesday Geek Women posts, but they are consistently our least read and commented on posts.) Or crying about stories that are negative and horrifying either.

It’s going to be hard to stand by a statement that I don’t begrudge Katie and Maya their outpouring of support, but: I don’t begrudge Katie and Maya their outpouring of support. I don’t think they should have less of it.

… but I think geek women and other bullied or oppressed geeks should have more.

Thus I do want to ask why girls? Why do we not have 170 comments on our blog reaching out to women who are frustrated with geekdom? I want to get this out in the open: people love to support geek girls, they are considerably more ambivalent about supporting geek women.

There are a number of reasons, I know, even aside from the (provocative!) title of the blog post. Some of them are more sympathetic than others:

Talking to adults about overcoming difficulties is harder. There can’t always be as much optimism or tales of It Gets Better. For some adults, that’s bullshit. (It’s not always true for children either and telling children this can be a disservice too, but it is more culturally comfortable.)

Adults are often angry when they’ve been mistreated. In this case, feminists are often angry. It’s harder to engage with angry people. They (we) are less appealing. We may not be grateful for your thoughts. Sometimes we pick them apart publicly if we don’t like them enough. And call you mean names.

When a child is bullied by another child, the bad guy is reassuringly definitely not you.

Children don’t talk back, or can’t. If an adult says that It Gets Better, the appropriate role for the child is to smile and look grateful. (This is also true of women when listening to men, but generally somewhat less so.)

Many of us are more familiar with the experience of being a bullied child than being a harassed or oppressed adult, and can be empathetic more easily.

We really really want to believe that things will be basically OK for Katie and Maya, even if they haven’t been for us and people we love.

There’s no easy answer. Many of us are very deeply invested in It Gets Better rhetoric, because the alternative is sure pretty sucky. But at the same time, if you’re doing one thing to stop gendered bullying this year, say, leaving the 170th supportive comment for a five year old girl, while kind, was probably not the single best use of your one thing. Join the fight. Make it better yourself. And, since you aren’t in fact limited to one thing, leave kind or supportive or co-signed righteously angry comments too, while you’re at it, and not only for children.

* At least, in the context of these discussions. I am far from believing that geeks are universally actively working to save children from bullying, nor that they are incapable of perpetrating child abuse.

A few times within the lifetime of this blog, there’s been a major emergency in geekdom: a geek girl has needed a confidence boost.

I hear you cough. Someone just said “geek girl” on Geek Feminism, the home of “ahem, geek women, THANK YOU”?

No really, I mean it, a geek girl. A prepubescent girl has been bullied or heard some gender essentialist crap, and a call to arms goes out. The best known is probably Katie Goldman, the then seven year old whose mother wrote in November 2010 that Katie was being bullied for liking Star Wars, a boy thing:

But a week ago, as we were packing her lunch, Katie said, “My Star Wars water bottle is too small. It doesn’t hold enough water. Can I take a different one?” She searched through the cupboard until she found a pink water bottle and said, “I’ll bring this.”

I was perplexed. “Katie, that water bottle is no bigger than your Star Wars one. I think it is actually smaller.”

“It’s fine, I’ll just take it,” she insisted.

I kept pushing the issue, because it didn’t make sense to me. Suddenly, Katie burst into tears.

She wailed, “The first grade boys are teasing me at lunch because I have a Star Wars water bottle. They say it’s only for boys. Every day they make fun of me for drinking out of it. I want them to stop, so I’ll just bring a pink water bottle.”

Katie’s story went viral including at the official Star Wars blog and a year later CNN reported that at GeekGirlCon when a brigade of Storm Troopers formed an honor guard for Katie, and that there’s an annual Wear Star Wars day as a result.

Here’s something I was struck by: when I tweeted about Maya’s post, back in May, I saw replies from men saying that they were crying (with joy, I assume!) about the response to Maya. I have to say I do NOT see a lot of admitted crying about other posts on our blog, no matter how positive or inspirational. (People love the existence of the Wednesday Geek Women posts, but they are consistently our least read and commented on posts.) Or crying about stories that are negative and horrifying either.

It’s going to be hard to stand by a statement that I don’t begrudge Katie and Maya their outpouring of support, but: I don’t begrudge Katie and Maya their outpouring of support. I don’t think they should have less of it.

… but I think geek women and other bullied or oppressed geeks should have more.

Thus I do want to ask why girls? Why do we not have 170 comments on our blog reaching out to women who are frustrated with geekdom? I want to get this out in the open: people love to support geek girls, they are considerably more ambivalent about supporting geek women.

There are a number of reasons, I know, even aside from the (provocative!) title of the blog post. Some of them are more sympathetic than others:

Talking to adults about overcoming difficulties is harder. There can’t always be as much optimism or tales of It Gets Better. For some adults, that’s bullshit. (It’s not always true for children either and telling children this can be a disservice too, but it is more culturally comfortable.)

Adults are often angry when they’ve been mistreated. In this case, feminists are often angry. It’s harder to engage with angry people. They (we) are less appealing. We may not be grateful for your thoughts. Sometimes we pick them apart publicly if we don’t like them enough. And call you mean names.

When a child is bullied by another child, the bad guy is reassuringly definitely not you.

Children don’t talk back, or can’t. If an adult says that It Gets Better, the appropriate role for the child is to smile and look grateful. (This is also true of women when listening to men, but generally somewhat less so.)

Many of us are more familiar with the experience of being a bullied child than being a harassed or oppressed adult, and can be empathetic more easily.

We really really want to believe that things will be basically OK for Katie and Maya, even if they haven’t been for us and people we love.

There’s no easy answer. Many of us are very deeply invested in It Gets Better rhetoric, because the alternative is sure pretty sucky. But at the same time, if you’re doing one thing to stop gendered bullying this year, say, leaving the 170th supportive comment for a five year old girl, while kind, was probably not the single best use of your one thing. Join the fight. Make it better yourself. And, since you aren’t in fact limited to one thing, leave kind or supportive or co-signed righteously angry comments too, while you’re at it, and not only for children.

* At least, in the context of these discussions. I am far from believing that geeks are universally actively working to save children from bullying, nor that they are incapable of perpetrating child abuse.

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She’s in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you’ve ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

Maya has also always, always loved cars and robots, right along with those butterflies and flowers and hearts. But recently she’s been saying that she doesn’t like these things anymore.

“I don’t like cars,” she told me, “because I want people to like me.”

This breaks my heart. And I imagine it breaks your heart, too. Five years old, and she’s already figured out just exactly how this thing works.

It turns out that “it got out” in school that she liked cars, so she says. And then the other girls in her class made fun of her for liking boy things.

All her life I’ve been talking about being true to yourself, about liking the things you find in your heart whether it’s a girl thing or a boy thing, and still, still, this is how fast it can unravel. Five years old, and she’s already trying to change who she is because she doesn’t think it’s who she should be.

Internet, talk to Maya, and talk to me. Tell us about girls who make robots and cars and bridges. Girls who build rockets, girls who can make and build and invent — girls who have grand adventures, but who can still go dancing, and still braid their hair, and still wear pink. Tell us about you. I know you’re out there.

I’ve played some pretty terrible video games, but this sounds like it may be a candidate for the worst game ever:

And that’s when it hits me, the one brilliant thing about this game: there is something in it for everyone. Everyone who plays it would find something in it that they hate.

Feminists would hate it. “Men’s Rights Activists” would hate it. Parents already hate it. Left-wingers would hate the consumerism and the objectification of women; right-wingers would hate the sexualization of young girls. Economists, as I’ve said above, would be baffled. Grammar enthusiasts would be appalled at its many punctuation and spelling errors. Models would hate that it makes modeling look easier and less cutthroat than it is. Fashion designers and artists would hate it for all the mismatched, misguided styling choices. My father would hate this game and Caryl Churchill would hate this game. Israelis and Palestinians would hate this game. We would all be united by our hatred of this, the most useless, uninteresting, universally offensive game known to humanity.

During the December/January slowdown, Geek Feminism is re-publishing some of our highlights from last year. This post originally appeared on September 16, 2011.

I always thought my friend Sarah summed up the appeal of My Little Pony the best:

Once you believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk, there isn’t much limit to your imagination.

My Little Pony group shot, artist unknown

I was the sort of little girl who had over a hundred My Little Ponies, largely due to my mother’s uncanny ability to find them incredibly cheap at garage sales. With so many, we could put on pony musicals where we wrote or adapted all the music and made costumes out of whatever scraps our parents were willing to lend us. My childhood best friend and I built an entire “computer game” for my little sister to play using ponies as the characters (Gameplay was inspired by our favourite adventure game for PC, Monkey Island. Nowadays, I’d call it a roleplaying game but I didn’t know the terminology then.) We had ponies on the bridge of the Enterprise, and ponies going camping on the very conveniently green-carpeted stairs in my house, and ponies ponies ponies.

So when I heard that the new series was being spearheaded by the woman who brought us Powerpuff Girls, I was intrigued. And then I started hearing stuff about how it was really good. In fact, it was so good that it was garnering adult fans, including men who were really not in the target demographic at all. “Bronies.”

But I was busy, so I held off ’till after my first big academic job talk when finally the juxtaposition between this latest transition to adulthood and my inner child was too funny to pass up. I loaded up a couple of episodes on youtube from my room at the bed and breakfast where I was staying. They were fun! So then, through the gruelling months of finishing my thesis, I’d use ponies as a treat for finishing a round of revisions. By now, I’ve almost learned all the words to the song in my favourite episode. I learned that Brony could mean any adult fan, not just the boys. I learned that the brown pony with the hourglass “cutie mark” on his butt had been fan-named “Dr. Whooves” for his resemblance to a certain timelord. I found myself hitting up Equestria Daily for a daily dose of cute fanart. I started making a pony crochet pattern while my internet was slow. I am most definitely hooked. (*groan* … crochet pun.)

Young Dash by Arcum89

Creator Lauren Faust says, “I used to say that my own inner eight-year-old was my personal focus group.” and she’s certainly channelled the sorts of adventures that my little ponies were having too. Most importantly, it doesn’t rely on the offensive “girly” stereotypes that irk me so much as an adult woman. Consider the “mane” six: Geeky Twilight Sparkle loves books and learning and isn’t afraid to show it. Honest Applejack is self-reliant even to a fault! Rainbow Dash is competitive (the way people keep telling us women aren’t supposed to be). Fluttershy is the timid animal lover, but with a core of strength especially when it comes to protecting her friends. Even Rarity, the most stereotypically girly debutante pony and fashion designer, is also a dedicated small-business owner. And Pinkie Pie is just soooo random. These gals aren’t always breaking into tears when life gets hard: they’re trying novel solutions and finding a lot of inner strength.

My specific dreams are still to make great entertainment for girls. I just don’t think there’s enough truly good stuff out there for them, but I also have kind of selfish reasons. When I think of something I want to say or an experience I want to share, my ideas are usually innately feminine because I’m female – and I refuse to believe that something being feminine by nature automatically means it isn’t worthwhile. If I can put the tiniest dent in the perception that “girly” equals “[bad]” or “for girls” equals “crappy,” I’ll be very satisfied.

I think Friendship is Magic has really got something special going here. Not only does it show the kind of role models I wish I’d had on TV as a little girl, but it’s also show that flies in the face of the common wisdom that boys (and even full-grown men) won’t watch anything where women or girls are the primary characters. You know, maybe the problem was just that we needed more good stuff for girls? So here we are with the bronies, eagerly anticipating the second season (which starts tomorrow!), planning meetups, and buying toys. Maybe, just maybe, this breakaway success will cause publishers to realize that if you make great TV for girls, it’s going to attract more than a narrow audience. This could be the beginning of evolution in girls’ programming. Heck, it could be the beginning of a change in the entire entertainment industry! But I know you’re going to tell me all I’m dreaming.

It’s okay, I’m willing to believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk; I can imagine anything.

Angela Zhang of Cupertino won a $100,000 scholarship for her cancer fighting research. In her project, Zhang aimed to design a targeted gold and iron oxide-based nanoparticle with the potential to eradicate cancer stem cells through a controlled delivery of the drug salinomycin to the site of the tumor. (…) The 17-year-old roughly estimates that the essence of her research could be available for use by cancer patients in 15 to 20 years.

How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It’s easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say “you’re being too emotional”. Who’s going to argue against that? All you have to do is find places where she emphasizes things instead of remaining in a flat monotone and you hit paydirt.

BusinessWeek asserts, Lego Is for Girls:Focusing on boys saved the toymaker in 2005. Now the company is launching Lego Friends for “the other 50 percent of the world’s children.” Will girls buy in?

I’m starting to think Lego is evil – Some musings on how lego has changed over the years, including the new “targeted at girls” line. This article’s from a dad, and I’d like to see some responses from women too, so if you’ve seen a good one (or written one!) please post in the comments. Mostly, though, you need to see this old ad he dug up:

11 To-Do’s for Women In Tech – Written after a panel at LISA, this is a very nice, short, clear list of advice for those trying to improve the numbers of women in tech. This probably won’t be new advice to many readers here, but it’s a good version to keep handy for those who want a short primer.

Greg Wilson is starting up a course on How to Teach Webcraft and Programming to Free-Range Students: Right now, people all over the world are learning how to write programs and create web sites, but or every one who is doing it in a classroom there are a dozen free-range learners. This group will focus on how we, as mentors, can best help them. This may be of interest to those hoping to mentor fellow women in technology!

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

I always thought my friend Sarah summed up the appeal of My Little Pony the best:

Once you believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk, there isn’t much limit to your imagination.

My Little Pony group shot, artist unknown

I was the sort of little girl who had over a hundred My Little Ponies, largely due to my mother’s uncanny ability to find them incredibly cheap at garage sales. With so many, we could put on pony musicals where we wrote or adapted all the music and made costumes out of whatever scraps our parents were willing to lend us. My childhood best friend and I built an entire “computer game” for my little sister to play using ponies as the characters (Gameplay was inspired by our favourite adventure game for PC, Monkey Island. Nowadays, I’d call it a roleplaying game but I didn’t know the terminology then.) We had ponies on the bridge of the Enterprise, and ponies going camping on the very conveniently green-carpeted stairs in my house, and ponies ponies ponies.

So when I heard that the new series was being spearheaded by the woman who brought us Powerpuff Girls, I was intrigued. And then I started hearing stuff about how it was really good. In fact, it was so good that it was garnering adult fans, including men who were really not in the target demographic at all. “Bronies.”

But I was busy, so I held off ’till after my first big academic job talk when finally the juxtaposition between this latest transition to adulthood and my inner child was too funny to pass up. I loaded up a couple of episodes on youtube from my room at the bed and breakfast where I was staying. They were fun! So then, through the gruelling months of finishing my thesis, I’d use ponies as a treat for finishing a round of revisions. By now, I’ve almost learned all the words to the song in my favourite episode. I learned that Brony could mean any adult fan, not just the boys. I learned that the brown pony with the hourglass “cutie mark” on his butt had been fan-named “Dr. Whooves” for his resemblance to a certain timelord. I found myself hitting up Equestria Daily for a daily dose of cute fanart. I started making a pony crochet pattern while my internet was slow. I am most definitely hooked. (*groan* … crochet pun.)

Young Dash by Arcum89

Creator Lauren Faust says, “I used to say that my own inner eight-year-old was my personal focus group.” and she’s certainly channelled the sorts of adventures that my little ponies were having too. Most importantly, it doesn’t rely on the offensive “girly” stereotypes that irk me so much as an adult woman. Consider the “mane” six: Geeky Twilight Sparkle loves books and learning and isn’t afraid to show it. Honest Applejack is self-reliant even to a fault! Rainbow Dash is competitive (the way people keep telling us women aren’t supposed to be). Fluttershy is the timid animal lover, but with a core of strength especially when it comes to protecting her friends. Even Rarity, the most stereotypically girly debutante pony and fashion designer, is also a dedicated small-business owner. And Pinkie Pie is just soooo random. These gals aren’t always breaking into tears when life gets hard: they’re trying novel solutions and finding a lot of inner strength.

My specific dreams are still to make great entertainment for girls. I just don’t think there’s enough truly good stuff out there for them, but I also have kind of selfish reasons. When I think of something I want to say or an experience I want to share, my ideas are usually innately feminine because I’m female – and I refuse to believe that something being feminine by nature automatically means it isn’t worthwhile. If I can put the tiniest dent in the perception that “girly” equals “[bad]” or “for girls” equals “crappy,” I’ll be very satisfied.

I think Friendship is Magic has really got something special going here. Not only does it show the kind of role models I wish I’d had on TV as a little girl, but it’s also show that flies in the face of the common wisdom that boys (and even full-grown men) won’t watch anything where women or girls are the primary characters. You know, maybe the problem was just that we needed more good stuff for girls? So here we are with the bronies, eagerly anticipating the second season (which starts tomorrow!), planning meetups, and buying toys. Maybe, just maybe, this breakaway success will cause publishers to realize that if you make great TV for girls, it’s going to attract more than a narrow audience. This could be the beginning of evolution in girls’ programming. Heck, it could be the beginning of a change in the entire entertainment industry! But I know you’re going to tell me all I’m dreaming.

It’s okay, I’m willing to believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk; I can imagine anything.